Ecommerce Website Customer Reward Program

A lot of big retailers both online and off use customer incentives to increase sales for the business. They go by the name customer retention programs or customer reward programs. These effective tools can be integrated into any marketing campaign. The main purpose of having this kind of program is to reward customers for making repeat purchases, it promotes loyal buying behavior.

How a customer incentives program works is a visitor to your e-commerce site makes a purchase and as a result earns reward points based on either the total amount spent, the number of products or specific type of items purchased. They will then accumulate those points and use it towards future purchases. You, the e-commerce business owner, can choose how the customer reward program works. You can set a threshold for the number of points necessary in order for customers to redeem their rewards. You can also designate what type of incentive to offer them, which can be in the form of discount for future purchases, free gifts or gift cards.
Simply having a customer reward program is not sufficient, you have to guarantee that it’s both simple to find and simple to use for your customers. It’s necessary to display image or text links throughout your e-commerce site allowing customers to get the information they are looking for. Ideally, these links should be placed in areas such as headers, footers and sidebars. This way it does not matter which page a visitor is on, they will be able to get to the customer incentives page. The information you provide your customers is critical as well, be detailed when instructing them on how to redeem their reward. The worst thing for a customer is not having any idea on how to redeem their points or getting unknown errors when completing a purchase. Go over all the small details and think like a new visitor, then make relevant changes to your site.An ecommerce solution that offers a customer reward feature should be able to do the following:
- Built-in reward points systems in the store control panel
- Be able to choose what type of reward to offer
- Be able to convert points into gift cards or gift certificates
- Be able to develop you own regulations for calculating reward points
- Be able to specify certain criteria for reward redemption
There are several advantages for offering customer incentives on your e-commerce site. It’s a powerful tool that will not only help you acquire new customers but also  retain existing customers. Studies indicate that it is much easier to market to current customers than it is to acquire new ones. As a matter of fact, it is 7 to 10 times more expensive to acquire new customers than it is to get an existing customer to buy from you again. Repeat customers on average will spend 33% more than new customers and if they belong to a customer retention program, they typically spend 4 times as much money. All of this should be enough reason to create a customer reward program of your own.
Since you are primarily targeting current customers, the first thing you must do is announce this new program to them. Be sure to include image and text links all over your web site and if you have a mailing list, send an email out to everyone on that list. Don’t forget to include program details in the checkout area. It can also be used as a promotional tool to gain new customers. Useful tactics include rewarding existing customers for recommending their friends, starting contests where participants can earn rewards and giving away points to people with positive feedback that will help improve your website. Customer reward programs have the ability to become viral, especially if you make use of contests to encourage people to join. Promote it to well known bloggers, post to related forums or encourage more people to follow you using a social media campaign. All of these tactics can be used to promote your business, the customer incentives are used to get them to return.
Now that you know all the reasons why you need to have customer retention programs, you must first choose a reliable e-commerce solution that can easily set up a reward points program within your e-commerce site. It needs to be effortlessly set up and very simple to manage. Most importantly, customers must be able to use it without any difficulties.

Source: Google.com